Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about feeling good. So I'll start with a provocative, but perhaps intuitive statement, which is that everything is easier when you feel good. We tend to be more patient when we feel good. We tend to feel like we have more energy for life when we feel good.

We tend to feel like more of our best selves when we feel good. Feeling good is important. And I do think it's something that we should try to cultivate more of in our life. Now a lot of times we go about feeling good in destructive ways. We might use substances to get there or we might use short, quick fixes to try to feel good in the moment, but it has long-term consequences.

So one longer term, sustainable way to feel good is to start meditating, which we do a lot of here at Mindfulness.com. But the interesting thing about meditation and its relationship to feeling good is that, in order to meditate, you actually have to stop trying to feel good. And what I mean by that is that it's often our attachment to feeling a certain way in the meditation that actually gets in the way of the meditation, because the orientation where often taking in most forms of meditation, especially mindfulness meditation, is allowing this moment to be here as it is without pushing against everything we don't like, without trying to grasp all the things that we do want. Both of that, right, the pushing and the pulling, these are just more forms of tension that we create in relationship to the experience that's arising. And so in many ways, meditation is the process of no longer trying to feel good.

But it's also the process of no longer trying not to not feel good. It's making space for what is here within us. But the cool thing about that is when we inhabit that relationship to our experience, there's a spaciousness, an ease, something in us gets to relax. And that orientation to our experience is inherently pleasant. It brings a natural kind of joy and clarity and ease.

So let's sum this up in three lines. Everything is easier when you feel good. To feel good, just start meditating. And to meditate, just stop trying to feel good. Have some, some fun trying to contemplate that one today.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.